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3/7/2012

Rona Pondick / Daniel Richter

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac - Marais, Paris

Rona Pondick

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is pleased to announce its fifth solo exhibition of new sculptures and drawings by Rona Pondick.

Born in 1952, the artist lives and works in New York. She studied at Queens College in New York and the Yale University School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut.

Since her work first came to prominence in the late 1980’s, Pondick has worked with fragments that invoke the body, including shoes, baby bottles, and teeth, to make wholes that are psychologically provocative and highly suggestive.

In the late 1990’s Pondick made her first hybrid sculptures marrying her own bodily fragments with animals or trees. This exhibition includes sculptures where Pondick integrates her own head and hands with tree forms using hand modeling, computer technology, and ancient casting techniques. Fluidly integrating the hand modeling with a wide range of cutting edge technologies, Pondick makes pieces that are so highly articulated they are technical tours de force. She sees technology as providing tools for her exploration in pursuit of the imagistic, the metaphoric and the psychologically suggestive.

As in Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, Pondick makes a relationship between the human figure and tree forms, evoking bodily feeling and psychological content that shows up in historical mythological subjects. Ginko’s cluster of hands with their palms face up make gestures of receiving, wanting, and yearning that seem to emerge from the branches of the tree. Head in Tree makes powerful relationships between its “umbilical” roots, spine-like trunk, branches, and deeply concentrating head. In Head in Tree, Ginko and Dwarfed Pine, all cast in metal, the transitions between the human and tree forms are so convincing the pieces look as if nature made them.

Bodily feeling is also strongly evoked in Pillow Head, in ways that suggest birth, attachment, tenderness, comfort, and love. Pillow Head, cast in bronze and painted, looks simultaneously soft and as if it is made of porcelain.

Since 1998 Pondick has been working with the same head, originally taken from a life cast but altered for each sculpture. This exhibition includes recent, intimately scaled drawings, where the artist uses her head as a starting point, distorting its form, mutating it to the point where the original, drawn from the life cast has all but disappeared. The drawings are layered in ways that show ghosts of the history of their making.

Pondick has been exhibited widely in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Bologna, the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, the Rupertinum in Salzburg, the Israel Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, The Cranbrook Art Museum, the Worcester Art Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art among others.

Pondick’s work has been included in major international exhibitions including the Lyon, Venice, and Johannesburg Biennales, the Whitney Biennial, and Sonsbeek, and in over one hundred museum exhibitions internationally.

Her work is represented in many important private collections and foundations and in over 30 museum collections internationally including the Centre Pompidou, the Israel Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the National Gallery in Washington, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

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Daniel Richter

Voyage, Voyage

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is presenting its second solo exhibition by Daniel Richter and it’s his first one-man show in France for more than ten years.

Under the title Voyage, Voyage, the exhibition shows works which, against a linear seismographic background, depict mysterious figures bathed in artificial light, typical of Richter's work. Involved in peculiar interactions, they seem like actors on a stage. Richter's new series of works is characterised by a graphic, almost Secessionist style and glazed paint application on the one hand, and by innovative orientation towards the symbolism of the previous turn of the century, towards the mysticism of Odilon Redon and Félix Vallotton's compositions, dominated by contrasting black and white. At the same time, characteristics from cartoons, comics and graffiti are perceptible. In his oil paintings, Richter combines aspects of the history of art with mass media and pop culture. The title of the exhibition is an ironic homage to a famous French hit from the late 1980s by an artist named "Desireless". The figures in Daniel Richter's new works often stand alone in a vast landscape and appear to be experiencing a sublime, contemplative moment. It is left to the imagination, whether these are musicians or warriors; they could be travellers on a long-forgotten quest, the goal of which remains unclear. Some paintings are dominated by dynamic movement, not only of the figures, but also of the colour fields. In other paintings, black figures surround the mountain landscape like spreading ink stains.

In 2004, Daniel Richter commented on his change from abstract to figurative painting – a personal turning-point he effected at the start of the millennium. "Ultimately, there is no difference between abstract and figurative painting, apart from certain forms of their decipherability, but the problems of organising paint on surface always remain the same. In both cases the same method insinuates itself in different forms."
From 1992 to 1996, Daniel Richter studied with Werner Büttner – together with Martin Kippenberger, one of the protagonists in the revival of expressive pictorial trends in the 1980s – at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg and worked as assistant to Albert Oehlen. Initially, he created abstract paintings with an intense psychedelic colour cosmos moving between graffiti and convoluted ornament – equally oriented towards Surrealism and Underground, as well as the elongated, entwined body forms of Italian Mannerism.

Since 2000 Richter has created large-scale scenes with a myriad of figures, frequently inspired by reproductions from newspapers, magazines and history books. They express battle and menace, and at the same time contemplation. Richter's change to the figurative has frequently been celebrated as the revival of history painting. While classical history painting relied on clearly legible pictorial narration and aimed to legitimise the present through historical references, Richter's paintings deal with the failure of social utopias. "I was interested in how one could refer to the world and the image of the world as I want to perceive or describe it", explained Richter in 2007.
The observation of Richter's style to date reveals an artistic practice "which should be about letting the picture drift towards a superabundance of colours and painting" (Roberto Ohrt, 1997), though this has been weakened in the latest work cycle in favour of increased tonality. In this context, the symbolist painter James Ensor and the expressionist pioneer Edvard Munch can be considered as Richter's artistic precursors. At the same time, Richter is indebted to the painting of Albert Oehlen and Martin Kippenberger, demystifying as it does the aura of the painted image. Many of Daniel Richter's works are puzzle pictures, playing with formulae of historical pathos for which the viewer has to provide content from his own knowledge and his ideas of politics and pop culture.

A further aspect of Daniel Richter's painting is that of light. The entire picture is interspersed with white accents marking elevations and highlights. "Richter's pictures are light-painting, though not in the sense of ambient chiaroscuro or plein air painting, but as experiments with contemporary light forms" (Christoph Heinrich, 2007). The representation of artificial light, flash light, thermal and x-ray images evokes an atmosphere of artificiality and nervousness. The topic of total surveillance appears to be an important leitmotiv in Richter's œuvre; the association with infra-red and thermal cameras in border surveillance is all too obvious, and reveals a paranoiac view.
The subjects of Richter's pictures suggest current political topics not defined in detail. Events, "whether they are conveyed though the media or from one's own view, seem to serve Richter more as a projection surface for inner images, the origins of which remain hidden from the viewer" (Fritz W. Kramer, 2002). With evident relish, Daniel Richter plays around with an iconography of radical political gestures.

Richter's socialisation in the politicised atmosphere of the Hamburg squatter scene has clear motivic counterparts in his work, while his great institutional success (major solo exhibitions at the North Rhine-Westphalia Art Collection in Düsseldorf and the Kunsthalle in Hamburg in 2004 and 2007) and his career in the international art market contradict this aspect of his past. Richter's ambivalence between his left-wing beliefs and the middle-class ethos paired with the establishment that he encountered in the art world was an issue that has often been addressed by the press. Daniel Richter's most recent major solo exhibitions were held at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg (2010) and the Kestnergesellschaft in Hannover (2011).

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
7, rue Debelleyme - Paris
Hours: Tues-Sat 10am-7pm
Free admission

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